Tag Archives: DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office

Department of Energy News Release

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of 13 projects to receive a total of $28 million to advance wind energy nationwide. While utility-scale, land-based wind energy in the United States has grown to 96 gigawatts, significant opportunities for cost reductions remain, especially in the areas of offshore wind, distributed wind, and tall wind.

The funding selections were announced by DOE’s Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Daniel R Simmons, at the American Wind Energy Association Offshore WINDPOWER Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. “These projects will be instrumental in driving down technology costs and increasing consumer options for wind across the United States as part of our comprehensive energy portfolio,” said Simmons. Read more here.

Hanging with the Lab Rats: NREL researchers lay groundwork to accelerate US clean energy transition, Utility Dive. The DOE lab is examining the impacts of “turbulence” on wind turbines and how to integrate battery storage systems and hydrogen alongside electric vehicle technologies. “We are in the middle of transforming the energy supply,” said Martin Keller, director of NREL and president of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, the company that operates NREL for the U.S. Department of Energy. The motivation: Investors and markets are at risk from $2.2 trillion of stranded fossil fuel assets, according to London-based think tank Carbon Tracker. “On a global scale, for the fossil fuel industry, stranded assets will be a major, major issue,” Keller said.

NextEra is on a roll, PV MagazineThe largest wind and solar developer continues to grow, with more solar projects paired with storage as it reaches 5.3 GW of contracted solar projects. And it’s making good money at the same time.

Posted by Betsy Lillian, North American Windpower

Texas, Iowa and Minnesota are the top three states for overall distributed wind capacity, and Iowa, Nevada and Alaska are the top three states for small wind capacity, although there were no new documented projects in Iowa or Nevada in 2018. Rhode Island, Ohio and Nebraska led the U.S. in new distributed wind power capacity in 2018 with large-scale turbine projects. Now in its seventh year, the Distributed Wind Market Report was funded by the DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office. More on the report can be found here. Read the entire post here.

Among the Report’s Key Findings:

U.S. distributed wind installed capacity now stands at 1,127 megawatts (MW) from over 83,000 turbines across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam.

In 2018, 12 states added 50.5 MW of distributed wind capacity from 2,684 turbines, representing $226 million in investment.

Photo by Dixon Power Systems, based in Lincoln, Nebraska: One of two 5-kilowatt wind turbines installed at the University of Nebraska’s Haskell Ag Lab. Click here to view a timeline video of the construction of one of the turbines and a photo of a 10-kilowatt project installed at the Prairie Hill Learning Center.

Distributed Wind Energy AssociationThe Distributed Wind Energy Association (DWEA) is a collaborative group comprised of manufacturers, distributors, project developers, dealers, installers, and advocates, whose primary mission is to promote and foster all aspects of the American distributed wind energy industry. Distributed wind, commonly referred to as small and community wind, is the use of typically smaller wind turbines at homes, farms, businesses, and public facilities to off-set all or a portion of on-site energy consumption.

Over the past three years, DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office funded an effort to characterize the baseline of public acceptance of wind facilities in the United States. In the first nationwide survey of wind project neighbors and the largest such survey conducted in the world to date, researchers collected survey data from over 1,700 randomly selected individuals living within five miles of 234 domestic wind projects. As a result of this research, Lawrence Berkeley researchers have been hosting a January – March webinar series, titled, Understanding Wind Project Neighbors through a National Survey of Attitudes.

Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office

Click image to watch a brief video about DOE’s Atmosphere to Electrons initiative.

New energy science and technological breakthroughs could cut the cost of wind energy in half by 2030—making it fully competitive with the fuel cost of natural gas.

This new finding is outlined in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that examines the future of wind power plants—backed by the supercomputing power of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories.

It’s part of DOE’s Atmosphere to Electrons initiative, which focuses on maximizing efficiencies at the plant level (i.e. how wind turbines interact with one another and the atmosphere) rather than treating each wind turbine as an individual unit. The next step is for DOE to apply high-performance computing to this grand challenge of better understanding the complex physics that control electricity generation by wind plants. Continue reading here.

Additional Department of Energy ReportsWind Energy Continues Rapid Growth in 2016During American Wind Week, August 6–12, the Energy Department released three wind market reports demonstrating continued growth in wind energy nationwide. The reports cover the following market sectors: land-based utility-scale, offshore, and distributed wind. America’s wind industry added more than 8,200 megawatts (MW) of utility-scale wind capacity last year, representing 27% of all energy capacity additions in 2016. 14 states now get more than 10% of their electricity from wind.